‘Is ‘all Russia our garden’? The dualism of environmental space in Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard and modern women’s drama

Journal article

The present article is devoted to analyzing the representation of the garden in postSoviet drama, covering the works of the most popular and influential women dramatists, Liudmila Razumovskaia (A Garden Without Soil, 1982), Nina Iskrenko (Is the Cherry Orchard Sold? 1993), Ekaterina Narshi (The Shadow of a Tree, 2003), and Nina Sadur (The Garden’s Doctor, 2011) in relation to Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. I offer a new interpretation of the creative engagement of modern dramatists with their Russian literary hypertext by presenting The Cherry Orchard as both the primary donor text of the garden spatial marker and an object of refutation. The article argues that modern women’s drama inherits the duality of environmental space from Chekhov’s play: the garden topos functions as the existential environment for the female protagonist, whereas the garden locus epitomizes natural (and exploitable) space. Women’s drama represents the garden as intrinsically connected with the fate of the female dramatis personae: as a locus, the garden with its nature is doomed to destruction; as a metaphysical topos, it brings devastation, ruin and death to the principal heroines. The innovative treatment of the garden locus and topos in modern Russian women’s drama is based on an aesthetic and theatrical experiment with the Chekhovian heritage, which consists in the gradual defamiliarizing of environmental space achieved through the introduction of a modern socio-political context. I demonstrate that in modern plays, the duality of the spatial marker, based on the distinction of a geographical locus and a metaphysical topos, becomes central to decoding their primary message and to revealing their contribution to modern theatre.

Authors: New, K

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
• Journal: Slavic and East European Journal
• Volume: 68
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 196-214
• Publication date: 2024-09-03
• Acceptance date: 2024-01-04
• EISSN: 2325-7687
• ISSN: 0037-6752
• Language: English